Beyond Responsive – Website Design Tips For Mobile

Beyond Responsive – Website Design Tips For Mobile

Smartphones are now the primary way people
access the internet. We use them for over 60% of our browsing and, since 2016,
over half of the UK’s online shopping has been done on them. Their importance
is such, that Google downranks websites that aren’t mobile-friendly and, since
last year, uses mobile pages rather than desktop pages to rank sites in search
results. These facts make it absolutely critical that when you create your
website, you focus on the mobile version and in this post, we’ll look at some
of the most important factors you should consider.

Responsive isn’t good enough

Google made the decision to downrank
websites that didn’t render well on mobiles back in 2015. By that time, many
websites were already responsive but the impact of Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’, as
it became known, caused most of those that were lagging behind the times to
follow suit.

That, however, was over three years ago and
things have moved on since then. While responsive websites are an absolute
must, today, they are the bare minimum of what you should do.

Speed
is crucial

While a responsive website will adapt the
content to fit mobile screens, it won’t help it load any faster. And loading
times are highly important for mobiles because, when not connected by wi-fi to
the high-speed broadband of the user’s home, they are often left with much
slower connections, such as public wi-fi and patchy 3G and 4G networks. Sites
that load slowly are much more likely to be abandoned by impatient users. Not
only does this cause a loss in traffic and sales,
it also produces negative analytics data (short session times, high bounce
rates, etc.) that signals to Google that your site might not be worth ranking
highly.

How do you counter this? There are a number
of things you can do, which when done together can have an impact on page
loading times. Moving to a faster hosting
package, i.e., upgrading from shared hosting to VPS or using servers with SSD
drives instead of HDD can ensure that data is processed and served more
quickly.

Reducing the size of the data needed to
load your site can also help. This can be done through compression, caching,
image optimisation, script minification and the use of content delivery
networks. If you have a site that relies on endless numbers of plugins or
add-ons, getting rid of any unnecessary ones or using lighter versions can also
help.

Designing for mobile use

To make your website truly mobile-friendly
you need to think beyond how something
looks on a mobile screen and consider how someone uses their phone to interact
with your site. When using a desktop device, people generally use a keyboard
and mousepad to interact and have both hands available to type, click and
scroll. On a mobile, there is a much smaller touch screen that is operated
using one hand and with interactions often done just by thumb. This invariably
means that things which are easy to do on desktop
devices are generally much more challenging on a mobile. If these things
are too challenging, exasperated users will just go somewhere else.

The
rule of thumb

Three-quarters of smartphone users do most of their mobile interactions with their
thumb. When designing your page, you need to consider how easy you make it for
the thumb to do things. Placing key touch elements, like menus, near the bottom
can help make your site more friendly as the user won’t have to stretch their
thumb as far or be inconvenienced by having to use another digit.

Another way to cater for how we hold a phone is to present content
using cards. These rectangular layouts are simple to use with a thumb as they
are easy to tap on or swipe. They also break up content into discrete,
uncluttered sections that can be easily seen on a small screen.

Thumbs are not the most precise of digits
for typing and tapping and when you have to do this on a small screen the
result is a constant series of errors. Hence why auto-text and autocorrection
can be so helpful. When creating a mobile page, therefore, take into
consideration how you can make it easier to tap on afield, input information
and click on links and buttons without making an error. This includes putting
enough room between things so that users don’t accidentally click on the wrong
one. How many times do people accidentally ‘like’ things when all they wanted
to do is scroll down?

Conclusion

With smartphones becoming the predominant
way to surf the internet, businesses need to go beyond responsive design to
create the truly mobile-friendly sites that both users and search engines are
asking for. This means creating sites which are super
fast at loading no matter what kind
of connection a phone has and designing
the layout of the page to take into consideration how a user holds the phone and
uses their hands to carry out tasks.

If you are looking for high-performance
hosting to help your site load faster on mobile devices, take a look at our VPS packages.

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